23/04/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Monday 23 April, 2007

Berliner Zeitung 23.04.2007

Andreas Mix explains why the Russian exhibition at the Auschwitz memorial was shut years ago by the director of the memorial and the international Auschwitz committee, and why it has now sparked a virulent Russian-Polish fight. "The memorial and the international Auschwitz committee are against the exhibition because it describes the inhabitants of the areas of Eastern Poland, which were occupied by the Red Army, as Soviet citizens. Russia is using the exhibition to continue writing Soviet history. According to this portrayal, the Soviet Occupation of 1939 to 1941, which was as brutal as the German occupation of Western and Central Poland, constituted the liberation of the population from the "yoke of the Polish masters."

Frankfurter Rundschau 23.04.2007

If Eckhard Stengel had his way, Murat Kurnaz' memoirs of Guantanamo "Fünf Jahre meines Lebens" (five years of my life) would be compulsory reading for German Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeyer who as chief of staff in the Chancellery under Gerhard Schröder took the decision to prevent Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turk who at the time of his imprisonment was in the process of applying for citizenship, from returning to Germany. "At one stage Kurnaz was reminded of primary school. 'It's like apple bobbing' he thought when he saw the tub of water. 'Only there were no apples in the tub.' They were going to make him talk, his interrogators said, and then thrust his head underwater, whereupon the soldiers punched him in the stomach. Kurnaz: 'I had told them everything. But what did I have to tell them? And then the business with the meat hook. 'I was hung up for five days,' he estimates ÄÂÂ my arms over my head, my feet dangling above the ground. Three times a day the doctor came to measure his pulse. 'Okay,' he says. Then the soldiers pulled me up again.'"

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 23.04.2007

Paris-based Russian writer Viktor Erofeyev sees today's Russia as a "drifting ice floe." Yet this ice floe is drifting neither to the West nor in the direction of civil society and democracy. Especially threatening to Erofeyev is the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church: "Elements of theocracy are slowly developing. One can by no means compare them with the religious fundamentalism in Iran. But they do stimulate a negation of foreign cultures and a distrust of any talk of universal values. The Czarist solution of 'orthodoxy, autocracy, popularity' has to a certain extent already become today's reality." See our feature "Russian dichotomies" by Viktor Erofeyev.

Die Tageszeitung 23.04.2007

Robert Misik sees the Pope's bestseller "Jesus of Nazareth" as a symptom of the crisis in the Church. "With his reading, the Pope seeks firmly to anchor the Church in today's world as a dissident, critical force. Again and again he proclaims how current the Church's concerns are. One should take a stand against the 'culture of having,' he tells us, and not bend to the 'dictates of ruling opinion.' And he's right there, the Pope. But any 16-year-old member of the SPD's youth organisation will see things exactly the same way. And so will Oskar Lafontaine of Germany's Left Party, only he would never dare put it so crudely. But unlike the Pope, they have no need of exegetical abstractions."

Saturday 21 April, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 21.04.2007

In an interview with Wolf Scheller, Nobel Prize winning authorGünter Grass focusses on the positive reactions to his confession that he had served in the Waffen SS (review of press reactions here), and talks about German-Polish relations: "As much as I empathise with the Poles' fear of their two large neighbours Germany and Russia, it's wrong to react with such fear solely on the basis of past experience. Poland finds it difficult to shed the role of victim. Today, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland is on the way to becoming a modern state. It's the first time the country has experienced this kind of freedom - and that as a member of the European Union. If you then start putting so much emphasis on the wounds of the past, and using them for political purposes like the current government is doing, you run the risk of isolating Poland in the long run."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 21.04.2007

Roger M. Buergel, the artistic director of the twelfth Documenta, the five-yearly 100-day art exhibition which which starts on 16 June, explains his mission. "The Documenta 12 is confronted with western middle classes, who are becoming more reactionary and reactive or indeed more pro-active and curious. The way to deal with this situation is closely linked, in my eyes, with a basic attitude towards crisis in general. It has to do with whether and how one faces up to a crisis. Aesthetic experiences do not offer us a poor foothold; they teach us how to enduretension and complexity. And they can teach us how to utilise the desire which stems from the realisation that this bottomless expanse of aesthetic experience is again holding all our expectations."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÄÂ ÄÂ about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more